a collective term, applied to an assemblage of several colleges, established in a city, wherein are professors in the several sciences, appointed to teach them to students, and where degrees or certificates of study in the divers faculties are taken up.

In each university four faculties are usually taught, theology, medicine, law, and the arts and sciences.

They are called universities, or universal schools, by reason the four faculties are supposed to take in the whole compass of study.

Universities had their first rise in the XIIth and XIIIth centuries. Those of Paris and Bologna pretend to be the first that were set on foot; but they were on a different footing from the universities among us.

The universities of Oxford and Cambridge seem entitled to greatest antiquity of any in the world; and Balliol and Merton colleges in Oxford, and St. Peter's in Cambridge, all made colleges in the XIIIth century, may be said to be the first regular endowments of this kind in Europe.

The universities of Scotland are four, viz. those of St. Andrews, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, and Glasgow. See Edinburgh, &c.